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Author: Harry Turtledove
(Seventh Star Press, 2013), he asked me for a piece on how to write alternate history, since Iâve done a fair amount of it. The question faintly alarmed me, since I usually donât think about how I do what I do, any more than a centipede thinks about how it keeps all those legs going. I just do it. I worried that, if I started taking apart what I did, I might start having trouble doing it, the way a contemplative centipede might end up with its feet all tangled together. But the prospect of a check got me going again, as I suspected it would. And Iâm still writing stories, too, which is nice.
I tâs mildly surprising that, these days, alternate history is mostly a subgenre of science fiction. Up through the first third of the twentieth century, it was the provinceâmore accurately, the playgroundâof historians and politicians on a lark. As far as I know, it was invented by a historian on a lark, and not one notorious for larkishness, either. Writing around the time of Christ, the Roman scissors-and-paste specialist Livy wondered what might have happened had Alexander the Great not died in 323 BC, but turned west and loosed his Macedonians against the Roman Republic. Livyâs opinion was that his long-dead ancestors would have handled Alexanderâs hoplite band just fine. My opinion is that Livy was a wild-eyed optimist, but thatâs neither here nor there. He wrote about not what had been but what might have been, and the die, as another Roman said, was cast.
More recent examples also have authors better known for things other than cranking out alternate history. In 1931, Winston Churchill published âIf Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburgâ in editor J.C. Squireâs If It Had Happened Otherwise: Lapses into Imaginative History . Churchill wasnât in the British government at the time, but he had been, and, as some of you will recall, he would be again. Three years later, Arnold J. Toynbee, a historian of considerably greater acumen than Livy, wrote âThe Forfeited Birthright of the Abortive Western Christian Civilizationâ as part of the second volume of A Study of History . This examines what a world where Celtic Christianity triumphed over the Roman variety and the Muslims succeeded in invading the Frankish Kingdom could have looked like. Both of these essays are party tricks, games intellectuals play.
So how did a-h become part of sf, then? Well, for one thing, sf writers have written a devil of a lot of alternate history. Those in our field whoâve turned their hand to a-h include Murray Leinster, L. Sprague de Camp (whose âThe Wheels of Ifâ dramatizes the results of Toynbeeâs speculation), Poul Anderson, H. Beam Piper, Philip K. Dick, John Brunner, yours truly, S.M. Stirling, Kim Newman, William Sanders. ⦠I could go on, but you get the idea.
And itâs not surprising that this should be so, either. Alternate history uses the same extrapolative technique as other science fiction. It just plants the extrapolation at a different place on the timeline. Most sf changes something in the present or the nearer future and works out its consequences in the more distant future. A-h, by contrast, changes something in the more distant past and examines the effects of that change on the nearer past or the present. The tools are identical. Their placement, though, makes for different kinds of stories.
Outsiders still do pick up these tools every now and again. Over the past couple of generations, interesting alternate histories have come from writers as diverse as MacKinlay Kantor, Len Deighton, Richard Harris, and Philip Roth. In comments about The Plot Against America , Roth made it plain that he thought he was inventing something new and different with this whole what-might-have-been thing. He wasnât, but he produced an important book anyhow.
So youâve decided youâre going to write an alternate history this time
I tâs mildly surprising that, these days, alternate history is mostly a subgenre of science fiction. Up through the first third of the twentieth century, it was the provinceâmore accurately, the playgroundâof historians and politicians on a lark. As far as I know, it was invented by a historian on a lark, and not one notorious for larkishness, either. Writing around the time of Christ, the Roman scissors-and-paste specialist Livy wondered what might have happened had Alexander the Great not died in 323 BC, but turned west and loosed his Macedonians against the Roman Republic. Livyâs opinion was that his long-dead ancestors would have handled Alexanderâs hoplite band just fine. My opinion is that Livy was a wild-eyed optimist, but thatâs neither here nor there. He wrote about not what had been but what might have been, and the die, as another Roman said, was cast.
More recent examples also have authors better known for things other than cranking out alternate history. In 1931, Winston Churchill published âIf Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburgâ in editor J.C. Squireâs If It Had Happened Otherwise: Lapses into Imaginative History . Churchill wasnât in the British government at the time, but he had been, and, as some of you will recall, he would be again. Three years later, Arnold J. Toynbee, a historian of considerably greater acumen than Livy, wrote âThe Forfeited Birthright of the Abortive Western Christian Civilizationâ as part of the second volume of A Study of History . This examines what a world where Celtic Christianity triumphed over the Roman variety and the Muslims succeeded in invading the Frankish Kingdom could have looked like. Both of these essays are party tricks, games intellectuals play.
So how did a-h become part of sf, then? Well, for one thing, sf writers have written a devil of a lot of alternate history. Those in our field whoâve turned their hand to a-h include Murray Leinster, L. Sprague de Camp (whose âThe Wheels of Ifâ dramatizes the results of Toynbeeâs speculation), Poul Anderson, H. Beam Piper, Philip K. Dick, John Brunner, yours truly, S.M. Stirling, Kim Newman, William Sanders. ⦠I could go on, but you get the idea.
And itâs not surprising that this should be so, either. Alternate history uses the same extrapolative technique as other science fiction. It just plants the extrapolation at a different place on the timeline. Most sf changes something in the present or the nearer future and works out its consequences in the more distant future. A-h, by contrast, changes something in the more distant past and examines the effects of that change on the nearer past or the present. The tools are identical. Their placement, though, makes for different kinds of stories.
Outsiders still do pick up these tools every now and again. Over the past couple of generations, interesting alternate histories have come from writers as diverse as MacKinlay Kantor, Len Deighton, Richard Harris, and Philip Roth. In comments about The Plot Against America , Roth made it plain that he thought he was inventing something new and different with this whole what-might-have-been thing. He wasnât, but he produced an important book anyhow.
So youâve decided youâre going to write an alternate history this time
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